Speaker Interview - Tom Anthony

This week we speak to Tom Anthony who is speaking in "The top 5 issues in SEO 2018"panel taking place at 12 July 2018 in the Amsterdam Affiliate Conference track.

Tom is VP Product at Distilled, where he leads the team building DistilledODN, the worlds first SEO A/B testing platform. He also does a lot of research around the future of search, and work with Distilled's consulting team to ensure that the recommendations their team gives are forward looking.

iGB Live!: Why is your session important for delegates?

Tom Anthony (TA): Machine Learning encapsulates a whole set of changes which, combined, represent the biggest change to the fundamental function of search engines since PageRank. We are moving from a hand crafted algorithm, to one that is increasingly designed by machines and less and less understandable to those who created the machines.

iGB Live!: How is your topic relevant to our industry?

TA: Gaming has always been a niche that the search engines gave special treatment to, and which attracted more aggressive tactics from competitors. With a machine learning algorithm that can customise which signals are important in different niches, we should expect to see approaches to optimisation change in new ways.

iGB Live!: What is the one thing you hope delegates get out of your session?

TA: The exciting, but scary, thing about Google’s increasing reliance on Machine Learning is that it makes it increasingly difficult to predict where search is going. I’m hoping that people will get an insight into the changes to how Google is thinking about ML [Machine Learning] as part of the algorithm, so they can better understand those changes as we see them.

iGB Live!: Why choose iGB Live! as the event to share your findings?

TA: I’ve never been before but have wanted to attend. If the reputation wasn’t enough, the reports from previous speakers make it clear this is an event you shouldn’t miss.

iGB Live: How do you plan on maximising your time at the event?

TA: There are a lot of smart speakers, so this an event where you want to pick up as many sessions as possible, but also want to make sure that you are about for the drinks later on. That is often where a lot of tips and new thinking is shared.